I can't hug Badal every day: Bajwa

Alleging the Prakash Singh Badal government was unleashing political vendetta, Punjab Congress chief Pratap Singh Bajwa today said his party had launched a toll-free helpline to enable its activists to seek free legal aid to pursue "false cases" slapped on them.

"I can't be hugging him (chief minister Badal) every morning. I have to oppose him. We can't tolerate the vendetta unleashed on our workers," he told reporters here.

On a pilot basis, a helpline had been launched from Amritsar from where the maximum number of "false cases" against the Congress workers had been reported, Bajwa said.

"The party has hired the service of 25 lawyers for the purpose," he said adding the facility would soon be extended to aggrieved workers in other parts of Punjab.

Talking to reporters in Fazilka, deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal said: "The propaganda of the Congress on political vendetta has been fully exposed as the party has failed to produce a single case in this regard for the past six years."

"Earlier, (former chief minister) Amarinder Singh kept on ranting about 50,000 vendetta cases against the Congress workers but failed to pinpoint a single one on the floor of the state assembly.

"Taking a leaf out of Amarinder's book, the new PPCC president (Bajwa) is raking up the same issue to get a few sound bytes," Sukhbir said.